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JUNE 2016 VIRGIN AUSTRALIA 125
CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT Bidens
pilosa, also known
as farmer’s friend,
adds sharp favour
to a dish; wild safron
milk cap mushrooms;
professional forager,
Elijah Holland.
iT’S A GREY, cold and drizzly autumn morning
but Elijah Holland is about to run into the ocean.
He’s on Mona Vale beach in Sydney’s northern
suburbs, his go-to place for seaweed. He’s just
come from Palm Beach where, at 6am, he was
searching for wildfowers.
For Holland it has been a fairly standard
morning. In fact, he could ofcially have the word
‘forager’ added to his business card alongside chef. He runs a
company called Nature’s Pick with business partner Bojan
Grdanovic, sourcing wild food for restaurants. Earlier this year,
Sydney’s Barangaroo precinct hosted a 10-week pop-up of
Copenhagen’s Noma — a restaurant considered by many to be
one of the most innovative in the world. And Holland was the
man who hunted, searched, pursued and tracked down as much
wild produce as he could, from the sea, the side of the road,
parks and state forests, for use in Noma’s kitchen.
“I was foraging full-time, I was getting so much stuf and
they wanted it all,” he says. “I mean the list was massive: wild
watercress, pennywort fowers, saltbush, lilly pilly, seaweed, ice
plants, mat rush and wild mirabelle plums.”
For anyone who hasn’t heard of these plants before, you’re
not alone: although perfectly edible, they’re not exactly the type
of ingredients you can pick up at your local supermarket.
“I live on the Northern Beaches so I hunt around there and
then down at the beach around Bondi, sometimes in the inner
city near the Cooks River, up near the Blue Mountains and
also the Snowy Mountains. Wild food is everywhere, it’s just a
matter of looking at your
surroundings,” says Holland.
A lot of Sydneysiders
would be surprised to hear
that places such as the Cooks
River can produce the kind of
ingredients you could serve
as part of a $485 menu. In
fact, a quick poll reveals that
most locals think of the river
as ‘pungent’ and ‘murky’.
But beauty is in the eye
of the forager. For Mike
Eggert and Jemma Whiteman
(chefs at Sydney’s 10 William
Street and co-nominees in 2014 for
Gourmet Traveller magazine’s ‘Best New
Talent’), the side of the road is as fne a
place as any to fnd great food. “The
Southern Highlands’ roadsides, especially,
are amazing and abundant, particularly
around Christmas time, for stone fruit and
wild berries,” says Eggert.
Hunting for food is something that
Eggert (ex-Pinbone, Duke, Billy Kwong)
and Whiteman (ex-Pinbone, Berta, Three
Blue Ducks) have been doing for a couple
of years. When asked why, Eggert says,
“The reward is wild, sustainable, organic
produce that has been weathered by
Australia’s harsh climate and the produce
expresses that. You get fantastically bitter
and acidic foods as well as sweet and
delicious fruits when the season is right.
A random fnd of something interesting
always inspires the creative juices and
gets the menu fowing.”
V0616_NAV_ExtremeChefs.indd 125
11/05/2016 10:46:54 AM